Trend Micro

Last week I attended the Sendmail Messaging Infrastructure Summit 2011 and the week before that Trend Micro’s Insight analyst event—both very good meetings!  Here are some thoughts on both companies:

• Trend Micro is doing very well financially: the company’s CFO reported that Trend could fund 891 days of its operating costs with no revenues coming in—Microsoft, also doing well financially, could do so for 434 days, while one of Trend’s biggest competitors in the security space could do so for 108 days. An unusual measure of a company’s financial health, but an interesting one nonetheless.
• Trend has a strong focus on security in virtualized environments and it’s a focus that I think is serving and will serve the company quite nicely. The company’s Deep Security offering is the foundation of their cloud security capability and offers a wide range of capabilities, allowing security to be built around the data itself so that it can, in essence, be self-defending.  Given that virtualization will be key to success in most cloud data centers, the ability to efficiently provide security in a VM environment is essential. Trend’s agentless anti-virus, for example, can reduce overhead on physical hosts, allowing greater VM density relative to agent-based approaches.  Without going into details, Trend is winning a lot of key accounts using its agentless security model and has seen its server security revenue increase fairly dramatically. Trend is also making a major push with enterprise public cloud providers, as well as in the SOHO market, in mobile, and in the big data market.
• The primary message from the Sendmail event—and one with which I wholeheartedly agree—is that the cloud for mid-sized and large enterprises will be based on a hybrid model. While smaller companies can likely use off-the-shelf offerings from cloud providers, larger companies tend to have specialized applications and use cases that demand some proportion of the infrastructure remain on-premise. Even Microsoft admits in its BPOS documentation that it may be necessary to keep some of the email environment on-premise.
• The meeting also provided some valuable insight into how companies decide to go to the cloud. For example, the CIO of one of Sendmail’s customers was impressed with BPOS—aided by a personal visit from Steve Ballmer—and decided to migrate the company’s many thousands of users to the cloud. However, the decision was made before the review, input or approval by any of the company’s IT architects. After their review was completed, the company concluded that more than one-half of its key requirements could not be satisfied by BPOS, and so the migration of email was put on hold, although the company is migrating SharePoint to the Microsoft cloud.

While completely unrelated events, one of the key themes running through both meetings was the importance of very good planning for large companies migrating to the cloud, whether public or private. Clearly, the cloud is where much of messaging and collaboration will migrate over the coming years, and for good reason—it allows better allocation of resources, lower costs, greater efficiency, etc. However, for large organizations every aspect and nuance of the messaging and cloud experience needs to be thought through very carefully, particularly in the context of security and application support. Yet, many key decision makers are not doing so with enough rigor or input from key stakeholders, and without sufficient consideration of every ramification of a wholesale move to the cloud.